This chapter is from the book

This chapter is from the book

3. Creating Main Windows

Subclassing QMainWindow

Creating Menus and Toolbars

Setting Up the Status Bar

Implementing the File Menu

Using Dialogs

Storing Settings

Multiple Documents

Splash Screens

This chapter will teach you how to create main windows using Qt. By the end, you will be able to build an application's entire user interface, complete with menus, toolbars, a status bar, and as many dialogs as the application requires.

An application's main window provides the framework upon which the application's user interface is built. The main window for the Spreadsheet application shown in Figure 3.1 will form the basis of this chapter. The Spreadsheet application makes use of the Find, Go to Cell, and Sort dialogs that we created in Chapter 2.

Behind most GUI applications lies a body of code that provides the underlying functionality—for example, code to read and write files or to process the data presented in the user interface. In Chapter 4, we will see how to implement such functionality, again using the Spreadsheet application as our example.

Subclassing QMainWindow

An application's main window is created by subclassing QMainWindow. Many of the techniques we saw in Chapter 2 for creating dialogs are also relevant for creating main windows, since both QDialog and QMainWindow are derived from QWidget.

Main windows can be created using Qt Designer, but in this chapter we will do everything in code to demonstrate how it's done. If you prefer the more visual approach, see the "Creating Main Windows in Qt Designer" chapter in Qt Designer's online manual.

The source code for the Spreadsheet application's main window is spread across mainwindow.h and mainwindow.cpp. Let's start with the header file:

We define the class MainWindow as a subclass of QMainWindow. It contains the Q_OBJECT macro since it provides its own signals and slots.

The closeEvent() function is a virtual function in QWidget that is automatically called when the user closes the window. It is reimplemented in MainWindow so that we can ask the user the standard question "Do you want to save your changes?" and to save user preferences to disk.

Some menu options, such as File|New and Help|About, are implemented as private slots in MainWindow. Most slots have void as their return value, but save() and saveAs() return a bool. The return value is ignored when a slot is executed in response to a signal, but when we call a slot as a function the return value is available to us just as it is when we call any ordinary C++ function.

We include the <QtGui> header file, which contains the definition of all the Qt classes used in our subclass. We also include some custom header files, notably finddialog.h, gotocelldialog.h, and sortdialog.h from Chapter 2.

In the constructor, we begin by creating a Spreadsheet widget and setting it to be the main window's central widget. The central widget occupies the middle of the main window (see Figure 3.2). The Spreadsheet class is a QTableWidget subclass with some spreadsheet capabilities, such as support for spreadsheet formulas. We will implement it in Chapter 4.

We call the private functions createActions(), createMenus(), createContextMenu(), createToolBars(), and createStatusBar() to set up the rest of the main window. We also call the private function readSettings() to read the application's stored settings.

We initialize the findDialog pointer to be a null pointer. The first time MainWindow::find() is called, we will create the FindDialog object.

At the end of the constructor, we set the window's icon to icon.png, a PNG file. Qt supports many image formats, including BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, PNM, SVG, TIFF, XBM, and XPM. Calling QWidget::setWindowIcon() sets the icon shown in the top-left corner of the window. Unfortunately, there is no platform-independent way of setting the application icon that appears on the desktop. Platform-specific procedures are explained at http://doc.trolltech.com/4.3/appicon.html.

GUI applications generally use many images. There are several methods for providing images to the application. The most common are the following:

Storing images in files and loading them at run-time.

Including XPM files in the source code. (This works because XPM files are also valid C++ files.)

Using Qt's resource mechanism.

Here we use Qt's resource mechanism because it is more convenient than loading files at run-time, and it works with any supported file format. We have chosen to store the images in the source tree in a subdirectory called images.

To make use of Qt's resource system, we must create a resource file and add a line to the .pro file that identifies the resource file. In this example, we have called the resource file spreadsheet.qrc, so we put the following line in the .pro file:

RESOURCES = spreadsheet.qrc

The resource file itself uses a simple XML format. Here's an extract from the one we have used:

Resource files are compiled into the application's executable, so they can't get lost. When we refer to resources, we use the path prefix :/ (colon slash), which is why the icon is specified as :/images/icon.png. Resources can be any kind of file (not just images), and we can use them in most places where Qt expects a file name. We cover them in more detail in Chapter 12.